His son Stefano recounted in “My dad, the father of the Scudetto” the life and intuitions of his father, who conceived the team that led to the Scudetto and gave six players to the national team
“I was just 10 years old when Gigi Riva came to pick me up from school making my teacher almost faint, who even did my primary school exam on her own initiative because we had to rush to training”. It is one of the many episodes in which the champion is the protagonist in the book, “My dad, the father of the Scudetto”, by Stefano Arrica, written in memory of his father Andrea, the manager who had the merit of conceiving the team that brought Cagliari to the scudetto and gave six players to the national team.
The shot of life
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“My father scored numerous market coups, some of which went down in history, but Gigi’s contract was the coup of his life”, on which he did not go back despite the contrary opinion of the Cagliari board of directors who did not accept kindly degree an investment of 37 and a half million of the old lire for a boy who came from a provincial Serie C team, although defined as promising by a well-known sports journalist of the time. Well, Andrea Arrica’s answer was that in that case he would have paid out of his own pocket, and despite the purchase proposal of 50 million from the President of Bologna Renato Dall’Ara, which arrived even before Riva landed on the island, the Lombard it was confirmed thus changing the fate of the team but also in part of the city, because with those epic results “Cagliari entered Italy”.
The tag
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Vice President Andrea Arrica, considered by all to be a President, was determined, intuitive, shrewd and affable. It was no coincidence that for many years he used Riva’s price tag to buy the best players from other teams, promising to sell the attacker to their respective presidents, but neither he nor the most desired striker in football had this desire. “They were courted in unison: the lawyer Gianni Agnelli called my father, while Giampiero Boniperti, the President of Juventus, called Gigi Riva, but the national team’s top scorer never wanted to leave Sardinia, nor did dad ever want to sell him because he gave all of himself to Cagliari and above all to Gigi, who when he arrived was a disoriented boy on an island that at the time made him think of Africa, that’s why my family pampered him, almost adopted him, he always came to eat with us, and in the years to come, when his only sister joined him, my mother helped him furnish the house”.
The vicinity
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Furthermore, when “Rombo di Tuono” suffered his first injury, the man who was his manager but also a friend and an older brother, as Gigi Riva himself defines him in the afterword of the book (“Andrea Arrica sent me from Heavens my parents so I didn’t feel alone”) he “kidnapped” him from a Roman clinic to take him to some trusted doctor friends of his. Due to the striker’s second injury, Cagliari, after winning against Saint-Etienne in the Champions Cup (the current Champions League), lost without Riva against Atletico Madrid. Another signature in the book that cannot go unnoticed is that of the President of Coni, Giovanni Malagò, a close friend of the author because their parents were close friends: Vincenzo, the then vice president of Roma, and Andrea, the architect of the 1969-1970 championship winning team. In the preface all Malagò’s esteem and affection for a talented and upright man emerges, faithful to his word, and whose entire existence was characterized by a winning sporting spirit stronger than any other siren. A quality passed on to his son, a member of the Coni Merit Commission and current president of the regional golf federation in Sardinia, who commented on Riva: “Even if we needed to redo the team, it’s a good thing that Gigi stayed because the man he is worth as much and more than the footballer”. Published by Pluriversum, the book was written together with the two co-authors Gianluca Zuddas and Sergio Cadeddu who helped reconstruct the facts and winning moves of Gigi Riva’s loyal talent scout.
March 22, 2023 (change March 22, 2023 | 16:13)
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